Animation software studio for professionals

Articles Toon Boom Studio

Toon Boom Studio is an animation tool that lets you bring your images to life on your PC.

Overview

Toon Boom Studio enables professional animators to create rich, eye-catching animations for video, websites, television, film, games, mobile devices, e-learning applications and much more. It should be clear from the start that this is strictly a professional application although the developers do offer a more basic version of Toon Boom Studio for beginners.

Features

Toon Boom Studio allows you to import media such as templates, movies and photos in SWF, AI, PSD, JPEG, TGA and GIF format. The aim of the studio is to make animation on your PC as natural as drawing with pen and paper.

You can bring life to your animations with sound (in WAV, AIFF, MP3 format). To make things look more realistic, there's a lip sync analyzer to make sure your characters lip-sync in time.

There are also zoom in and out features, the ability to create 3D spaces and to scale and rotate your creations until they're exactly right. Export formats are fairly flexible too including Flash (SWF), QuickTime, DV Stream and AVI. The other big advantage that Toon Boom Studio offers is that you don't need to learn how to animate in Flash to use it.

Toon Boom Studio is a powerful and flexible professional animation packages that should make your creations come to life.

Recent changes

Convenient Skeleton Effect Layer in the timeline

Useful Bone Level for segmenting and animating the character

Easy setting of rotation, length and position of the bones

Practical manipulation of the bones in the timeline

Fast transformation of vector shapes

Impressive transformation of pixmap textures

More accurate region of influence to move objects

Smart reuse of Bone templates on several characters

Real-time preview of Bone Effect

Full QuickTime export of Bone Effect

Fast SWF export of Bone effect (Vector shapes only)

Several software improvements and bug fixes

Notes

Online registration required in order to gain access to the free trial

Pros

5 different animation methods

Supports 3D backgrounds

Auto lip-syncing feature

Lots of output formats

Cons

A bit complex for beginners

0

1

2

3

4

More author programs

Toon Boom Studio is the complete animation software solution to quickly create eye-catching animations. The product has been used to produce many of the finest animations in recent times, including Looney Tunes: Back in Action, The Rugrats, and SpongeBob The Movie.

In addition, V3 offers a simplified user interface with Drawing and Sceneplanning in one single unified mode. With each release, Toon Boom Studio is injected with powerful new features that will help you make the most of your talents and your time.

"Toon Boom Studio is difficult to understand, and therefore needs a tutorial"

Like any new animation software, using for the first time is difficult. I have had trouble understanding the tools and tabs. I cannot find the filters list. I'm not sure about lip sync functions. It would be real helpful if you had some sort of inside tutorial.